Recently, Yan et al. proposed a quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol with authentication using single photons and Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pairs (Yan L. et al., Comput. Mater. Contin., 63 (2020) 1297). In this work, we show that the above QSDC protocol is secure neither against intercept-and-resend attack, nor against impersonation attack. With any of these two types of attacks, an eavesdropper can recover the full secret message. We also propose a suitable modification of this protocol, which not only defeats the above attacks, but also resists all other common attacks. Thus, our modified protocol provides an improvement over the existing one in terms of security.
Quantum Secure Direct Communication (QSDC) is an important branch of quantum cryptography, which enable secure transmission of messages without prior key encryption. However, traditional quantum communication protocols rely on the security and trustworthiness of the devices employed to implement the protocols, which can be susceptible to attacks. Device-independent (DI) quantum protocols, on the other hand, aim to secure quantum communication independent of the devices used by leveraging fundamental principles of quantum mechanics. In this research paper, we introduce the first DI-QSDC protocol that includes user identity authentication to establish the authenticity of both sender and receiver before message exchange. We also extend this approach to a DI Quantum Dialogue (QD) protocol where both parties can send secret messages upon mutual authentication.
Quantum conference is a process of securely exchanging messages between three or more parties, using quantum resources. A Measurement Device Independent Quantum Dialogue (MDI-QD) protocol, which is secure against information leakage, has been proposed (Quantum Information Processing 16.12 (2017): 305) in 2017, is proven to be insecure against intercept-and-resend attack strategy. We first modify this protocol and generalize this MDI-QD to a three-party quantum conference and then to a multi-party quantum conference. We also propose a protocol for quantum multi-party XOR computation. None of these three protocols proposed here use entanglement as a resource and we prove the correctness and security of our proposed protocols.
Quantum dialogue is a process of two-way secure and simultaneous communication using a single channel. Recently, a Measurement Device Independent Quantum Dialogue (MDI-QD) protocol has been proposed [A. Maitra, Measurement device independent quantum dialogue,Quantum Inf. Process. 16(12) (2017) 305]. To make the protocol secure against information leakage, the authors have discarded almost half of the qubits remaining after the error estimation phase. In this paper, we propose two modified versions of the MDI-QD protocol such that the number of discarded qubits is reduced to almost one-fourth of the remaining qubits after the error estimation phase. We use almost half of their discarded qubits along with their used qubits to make our protocol more efficient in qubits count. We show that both of our protocols are secure under the same adversarial model given in MDI-QD protocol.
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